GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 626094
Remove email from the gnome-cyr archives
Last modified: 2010-09-01 13:32:47 UTC
Dmitry Mastryukov forwarded an email from Nikita Kavun without permission and this email contains personal information (phone numbers, information about his work, etc). http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-cyr/2010-July/msg00034.html Dmitry asked the GNOME Foundation board of directors if this message can be removed fro the email archives so the information is no longer public. Can this be done? Thanks, Brian Cameron GNOME Foundation Secretary
The policy is that we do not edit or remove postings in the archives: http://mail.gnome.org/
I made an error in my first comment. What happened was that Dimitry posted personal information about Nikita, and now Nikita is asking if we could please remove the email with his personal information. In comment #1 I said that Dimitry asked to remove the email, which was incorrect. I understand the policy, and agree that we should not remove messages when someone unintentionally posts information about themselves that they later regret. However, in this case, one person sent personal information about another person. Would it be possible to make an exception in this case?
Agreed with Brian there. > My contact details are in your mailing list archives. Will you remove them? > > All messages sent to gnome.org mailing lists will be archived. You should not include any information in > your postings that you would not wish to become publicly available for the indefinite future. You should > disable your signature when posting if you do not want it's details becoming public knowledge. All posts > will remain viewable by posterity. Site policy is to not edit the archives except, except maybe in rare > cases to remove viruses. The problem is that the e-mail that was sent to the list was a private e-mail that got forwarded to the list. Whether public or not, it's also Nikita's fault that the data ended up being public, as I could imagine other cases where the data used in e-mail signatures. In this case: - Dimitry should not have forwarded Nikita's mail wholesale (though it's hard to see malice in this when this amount of information is included in e-mails) - Nikita is right asking for an exception, given that he did not contravene the guidelines mentioned above. Though I'm starting to wonder whether the removal will help with anything given that the mail was already archived in other locations, such as: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.internationalization.cyrillian/4010 http://www.mail-archive.com/gnome-cyr@gnome.org/msg02190.html etc. And that's just from a quick Google search.
I'm going to make an executive decision and close this ticket. While it is unfortunate that the email contents were forwarded, and we hope similar situations don't happen again, the email in question has already been archived on multiple other locations. Removing it from the GNOME archives will not have any effect, and that information will still be publicly available. Hopefully in the future, if similar situations arise, we'll be able to act quickly enough to remove such contents (as exceptions warrant) before they are propagated.